Screenshots!
You can now go to Tools > Screenshot and it will save a screenshot of your current page to Imgur. Then you can easily share it on Twitter or Facebook or Reddit or wherever.
Introducing Basketball GM Gold (no, it's not evil)
I've talked to a lot of people about Basketball GM. One of the most common things people tell me is that I should be making a lot more money from it, since users tend to get pretty addicted to it (the average user plays 1 hour per day). Imagine things like this:
- Player X tore his meniscus. Do you want to pay $1 to send him to Germany for a new treatment that will cut his recovery time in half?
- For $5, you can buy Special Training Points and use them to improve the ratings of your players.
- Pay $2 to hire a local shaman to perform a human sacrifice and bring your team good luck.
The problem is, that's all fucking bullshit so I'm not doing it. I don't want a financial incentive to ruin gameplay for people who don't dump endless amounts of money into the game.
Instead, I'm trying an experiment. As of right now, you can sign up for Basketball GM Gold for just $5/month. What do you get? Basically nothing, actually. No new features. No new abilities. Just one tiny thing: no ads. And the ads are already quite unobtrusive even without Basketball GM Gold!
Why would anyone sign up for Basketball GM Gold? To support my mission of making a great basketball sim that anyone can play. To support a game that says "Fuck you!" to the lucrative "freemium" and "pay-to-win" trends. And most of all, because you think I'm a nice guy.
I understand that there's a good chance nobody signs up for this and I just wasted my time by creating it. So I'm looking at this as an experiment. Can a quality game with a loyal userbase make a little money without fucking over that userbase? Let's see.
And if this does turn into a success... well, it could mean great things for Basketball GM. Currently I work on the game as a part time hobby. What if it could be more than that? I have literally hundreds of things I want to improve in the game and time is the only limiting factor now. What if I could work on it full time, and maybe even hire someone else to work on it with me? If a relatively small fraction of users signed up for Basketball GM Gold, I'd have enough money to do that.
Simulate through multiple seasons in one click
New feature! Go to Tools > Auto Play Seasons and you can tell Basketball GM to simulate through any number of seasons. The AI will take over your team for you and play through multiple seasons without any user input required.
I'm not sure how many people will actually benefit from this feature. I mainly made it for debugging. But I hope someone appreciates it!
New feature: Statistical Feats
Available now, view all the great performances in your league on one page. Just go to Stats > Statistical Feats. Triple doubles, 5x5s, 50 point games, etc. Eventually you will see this information pop up on player pages, team history pages, league history pages, and more. But for now, it's just on the Statistical Feats page, all in one place.
Note that this will only track performances from now on. It won't go back through the history of your existing leagues.
Easy stats export
As of the latest version (2015.01.31.658), you can go to Tools > Export Stats within a league and export either player average stats or individual game stats. The exported file is in CSV format, which means you can easily view it in Excel or any other spreadsheet software if you want to more deeply analyze the stats in one of your leagues.
I know it's missing a couple things now (playoff stats, team stats, shot locations, ...), but I want to make sure the core feature works well before implementing all of those.
Basketball GM is back on GitHub, but not quite open source
If you've been here a while, you may recall that Basketball GM used to be open source. Last year, I closed the source for various reasons. Now, I'm semi-opening it back up. My goal is to allow others to contribute to the development of Basketball GM without allowing a competitor to swoop in and just clone everything. I hope it works.
So please, take a look at the code and read the license. If everything looks enticing and you want to help make Basketball GM better, please get in touch! There are tons and tons of ways Basketball GM could be improved, in many different areas.
Powered by the KIRK HINRICH stack
The set of technologies used as a foundation for a piece of software is sometimes called a stack. The most famous is LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/PHP/Python). A trendier option is MEAN (MongoDB, Express.js, AngularJS, Node.js). And there are tons more, mostly tounge-in-cheek jokes at the absurdity of reducing a stack to a catchy acronym (at least, I hope that's what they are). There is even the LeBron stack: LevelDB, Browserify, and npm. In Basketball GM, I use npm a little and I indirectly use LevelDB through IndexedDB in Chrome, but sadly it'd be quite a stretch to say I'm using the LeBron stack.
What stack am I using? Nothing coherent or well established. Just a hodgepodge of things that somehow happens to work. But that's just not a catchy answer, so I set out to find a cool name for my stack. The LeBron stack is a fun name, so I figured I could try to find another NBA-inspired name.
Basketball GM 3.4 released - 20% faster game simulations! Beta is over!
After a long beta (thanks for testing!), the new version of Basketball GM is ready. All your leagues will be upgraded automatically. The main difference is that game simulation is about 20% faster. Additionally, there are some minor bug fixes (the NaN bug is finally gone, I think) and enhancements (real injury descriptions show in old box scores and uploading exported league files is much faster).
On the downside, Internet Explorer is no longer supported. If you're an IE user, you can export your leagues still. Then you have the option of switching to Chrome/Firefox or using an old version of Basketball GM. Hopefully IE support will return to the latest version eventually, but I'm not holding my breath.
Please let me know if you have any problems. Post here, on Reddit, or email me.
20% faster game simulation - try the beta now!
For some reason, I made a video demo showing off this feature.
TLDW: Game simulation is roughly 20% faster, particularly when you're many seasons in. Please test it out and let me know if you find any problems in any aspect of the game. Here's the link to the beta.
Revamped player development algorithm
One of the most important parts of Basketball GM is the player development algorithm. The tricky part is that different players develop differently depending on their ages and abilities. Previously, this was handled poorly in Basketball GM. But as of today, a new player development algorithm is live and you will hopefully find it much more realistic.